Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB SSD Review

Kingston Targets The Budget Minded Again

While Kingston has put out some enthusiast level drives under their HyperX brand, their bread and butter lies with the more cost conscious consumer oriented drives or ‘value’ drives as they are known in the industry. As such, they have a number of V series drives that are strong performers, yet are easy on the wallet. If it doesn’t jump out at you already, we’ll tell you that V stands for value and is exactly what Kingston hopes you see a lot of in their new V300 series of drives powered by the ubiquitous SandForce SF-2281 controller. We already know that this controller is a winner and it will now be paired with 19nm NAND flash which is not something we’ve tested before so it will be interesting to see how it performs.

Kingston has also taken on more of the fabrication piece to help drive down costs to offer the drives at a lower price point. As such, we find the 120GB bundle version (SV300S3D7/120G) they sent us selling on the open market at $124. Don’t make the mistake of equating a ‘value’ product with poor performance and shoddy fabrication. Each drive comes backed with a three year warranty and Kingston’s customer support. It also comes with some admirable read/write specifications of 450MB/s each, which you’ll see later that we exceeded in some instances of our tests.

Kingston SSDNow V300 120GB features and specifications:

Form factor:

2.5″

Interface:

SATA Rev. 3.0 (6Gb/s) – backwards compatible to SATA Rev. 2.0

Capacities:

60GB, 120GB, 240GB

Sequential Reads:

SATA Rev. 3.0 up to: 450MB/s

Sequential Writes:

SATA Rev. 3.0 up to: 450MB/s

Maximum Random 4k Read/Write:

60GB — up to 85,000/ up to 60,000 IOPS

120GB — up to 85,000 / up to 55,000 IOPS

240GB — up to 85,000 / up to 43,000 IOPS

PCMARK® Vantage HDD Suite Score:

60GB: 39,000

120GB: 49,000

240GB: 57,000

Power Consumption:

0.640W Idle / 1.423 W Read / 2.052 W Write

Storage temperatures:

-40 to 85°C

Operating temperatures:

0 to 70°C

Dimensions:

69.8mm x 100.1mm x 7mm

Weight:

86g

Vibration operating:

2.17G Peak (7–800Hz)

Vibration non-operating:

20G Peak (10–2000Hz)

Life expectancy:

1 million hours MTBF

Warranty/support:

Three-year warranty with free technical support

Total Bytes Written (TBW):

60GB: 32TB

120GB: 64TB

240GB: 128TB

The exterior shell design doesn’t deviate from previous and others in the ‘V’ lines with a textured aluminum gray shell and the familiar Kingston red/black/white color scheme with the image of Redhead a.k.a. “Rex” featured prominently as always. It’s a 7mm thick drive making it usable for most any mobile PC that uses a SATA connector.

The desktop bundle we received with the drive comes with all the niceties needed to install and migration your shiny new drive. First we have the installation DVD and the DVD containing the drive cloning software (very handy). Next, we have the rails for mounting the drive should your case not support the direct mounting of 2.5″ form factor drives. Finally, they also supply SATA power and data cables should you need them. Overall, a very nice bundle that adds more value (there’s that word again) to the purchase.